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This chapter argues that civic republicanism and procedural liberalism are allies, and that exaggerating their conflict is philosophically suspect and politically counterproductive. It explains the reasons why Sandel exaggerates the differences between these two approaches. It further argues that under certain circumstances, procedural liberalism is preferable to civic republicanism.

After reviewing John Rawls's arguments against utilitarianism in A Theory of Justice and then examining Michael Sandel's and Robert Nozick's criticisms of those arguments, Scheffler points to three important similarities between utilitarianism and Rawls's own theory. Both the theories are systematic and constructive in character, both treat common‐sense notions of justice as deriving from a more authoritative standard, and both are committed to distributive holism, in the sense that they regard the justice of any assignment of benefits to a particular individual as dependent on the justice of the overall distribution of benefits in society. These similarities may make it seem that Rawls's theory fails to remedy utilitarianism's neglect of the distinctness of persons. But Scheffler argues that Rawls's theory accommodates holistic pressures while maintaining a commitment to the inviolability of the individual. Scheffler also suggests that the complexity of Rawls's attitude toward utilitarianism in A Theory of Justice may help to explain his willingness, in Political Liberalism, to treat utilitarianism as a candidate for inclusion in an overlapping consensus.

This chapter establishes that Green's republicanism overcomes the limitations of contemporary philosophical attempts to reinvigorate the republican tradition. Green avoids the contemporary dichotomy between ‘protective’ (Pettit) and ‘civic humanist’ (Sandel, Honohan) republicanism. The chapter begins by highlighting Green's self-identification as a republican, with the second section sketching the contemporary republican landscape. Section three establishes that Green's conceptions of ‘independence’ and ‘true freedom’ are superior to those used by contemporary philosophers. Green's conceptualisations of true freedom and intersubjective recognition are also explored. Section four analyses Greenian ‘civic virtue’ and its interrelationships with freedom. Section five explores the democratic contestability of the ‘common good’ in Green's republicanism, something that causes significant difficulties for contemporary republicans. Section six critically assesses Green's decentralised political structure, before section seven explores his radical theory of patriotism and civil disobedience. The conclusion argues that Green's republicanism is more coherent, integrated, and compelling than the leading contemporary versions.

This chapter begins by recalling the case of a New York City priest threatened with jail for not revealing evidence obtained in confession. The case helps reveal tensions that lie within liberalism, caused by what could be called its “identity problem” and “neutrality problem.” The latter is studied via writers such as William Galston and Michael Sandel, who show that liberalism cannot remain neutral with regard to the good in the way that the early Rawls proposed. They seek a liberalism that can accommodate republican or communitarian elements, which are decidedly not neutral. Those who recognize this and who seek an approach that incorporates rather than strips away constitutive commitments can be said to have made a “turn to loyalty.” The chapter concludes by offering a definition of loyalty that hopes to capture what has heretofore been missing.

This chapter summarizes the argument of the book as a whole. Ultimately neither Locke nor his many heirs, including Rawls, offers a fully satisfactory way of relating religious and civic obligations. This is chiefly because Locke's “solution” rested on (unspoken) theological presuppositions that we now have reason to doubt. A final section examines what alternatives might be considered that do justice to such obligations. In particular, I suggest that the Johannine liberalism that runs from Locke to Rawls is characterized by a distrust of “thicker” accounts of toleration (those that are more ad hoc and less “principled”). This distrust is connected to liberal public reason, which makes impossible the richer public discourse that would make more nuanced responses to the theopolitical problem possible.

This chapter lays out the received view of Rawls's political turn, according to which Rawls recast his view because of dissatisfaction with the argument which would serve as the public basis for principles of justice in a well-ordered society. That argument, which Weithman calls the “Pivotal Argument” is laid out with some care. The received view, referred to as “the Public Basis View”, is shown to face insuperable textual and philosophical difficulties.

Chapter 8 looks at several more worries about, and objections raised to, markets and business. This chapter focuses specifically on concerns raised about how markets can induce us to misvalue things—valuing some things too highly, valuing other things not enough. Chapter 8 argues that it is not things but rather people and their choices that should be valued. It also argues that one can advocate both liberty and virtue, that is, respecting people’s right to choose while retaining the moral authority to criticize—though not interfere with—their choices. It argues that working for wages is not plausibly similar to slavery and hence, contrary to some critics’ claims, should not be described as such. Finally, the chapter discusses tragedies of the commons and explores the ways that honorable business might address and mitigate some, if not all, of them.

This chapter demonstrates the incompatibility of the harm principle with various claims that forms of harmless immorality and other conduct that some people view as reprehensible or disgusting ought to be regulated or prohibited. The chapter asserts that under the externality constraint people may not generally have interests in others’ interests. The chapter also rejects communitarian, civic republican, and multiculturalist claims that because communities are sources of value government may regulate conduct that impinges on community norms. Finally, the chapter shows that by overturning law-like custom, antidiscrimination laws are consistent with the harm principle.

The chapter argues that the previous chapters have demonstrated that the harm principle accounts for basic liberal institutions and practices. So conceived, liberalism requires the understanding that participation in the state is not necessarily the highest good, that there is a realm outside the state that liberalism guarantees to the people in which to seek their own good, and that communitarian and other claims that uphold the Aristotelian notion of humans as zoon politikon rest on an ambiguity at the heart of antiliberal philosophies. That the state is limited to dealing with harm does not make life in a liberal society pallid; liberalism and its neutrality toward the good is no less noble for being modest or passive. The chapter points to signs that modern society has moved in significant ways toward accepting the harm principle and that a major unfinished piece of business is to develop and seek consensus over a theory of harm.

This chapter examines the conversation between economics and values in the age of global interdependence by focusing on the views of John Rawls, Michael Sandel, and Stanley Cavell on justice and education. It first considers Sandel's approach to justice—a conversation of justice across cultural and national boundaries—and what it calls the “Sandel boom” in contemporary Japan. It then compares Sandel's and Stanley Cavell's different modes of critique of Rawls's liberal concept of justice and of the idea of the human subject found therein. In particular, it comments on how Sandel and Cavell use the language of justice and how their respective critiques of Rawls reveal different convictions about the role of philosophy in awakening our common political consciousness. It also analyzes Cavell's Emersonian perspective and his perfectionist vision of education for political literacy from within before proposing an alternative vision of the conversation of justice and thus, an alternative horizon of economy—an economy of living.

This chapter addresses the question of nature as normative. Drawing on the writings of Michael Sandel, Leon Kass, and Francis Fukuyama, members of President George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics, it proposes three ways that nature is given normative status in contemporary discussions of bioengineering. Sandel, Kass, and Fukuyama all set out in the hope that a conception of the normative significance of nature will set limits and give direction to recent and emerging uses of biotechnology where the moral and political order of liberal society, with its narrow focus on autonomy and justice (Sandel), its exaggerated humanitarianism (Kass), and its failure to secure its own grounds (Fukuyama), has failed. In each case, the appeal to nature identifies certain goods that are threatened by the contemporary version of the Cartesian program: kinds of worth that resist our will to mastery (Sandel), aspects of embodied life that are the source of human meaning (Kass), and commitments to equality of worth (Fukuyama). In each case, though, the claim to establish nature as a norm was not sustainable, though for different reasons. We are left in the uncomfortable position of recognizing that to be entirely without nature in any of these three senses would leave us morally impoverished while acknowledging that we are unable to draw clear lines that would indicate the point at which our moral impoverishment would occur.

This chapter sketches the landscape of the enhancement debate. It introduces the two most prominent views: the anti-enhancement view—whose proponents include Sandel, Kass, and Fukuyama—and its opposition (the “anti-anti-enhancement” view). It identifies a number of deficiencies in the enhancement debate, including murky rhetoric masquerading as argument, the ignoring of evolutionary biology, unsupported empirical claims, fundamental unclarity in argument, and the inability to get beyond the pros and cons stage of debate. It also previews the book's efforts to correct these deficiencies and improve the quality of the debate. It introduces the book's proposal that one important way to improve the debate is to set aside the unhelpful question “are you for or against enhancement?” Instead the book focuses on the following question: is it ethically permissible for a reasonably liberal and democratic society to embark on the enhancement enterprise (i.e., the endeavor to develop the moral and institutional resources needed to pursue enhancements responsibly)?

This chapter articulates and evaluates the claim that the pursuit of enhancement is an expression of defective character, or in more traditional terms, a symptom of vice or at least of the lack of virtue. It argues that once we puncture the inflated rhetoric, serious concerns remain, but that they do not support anything approaching a blanket rejection of biomedical enhancement—not even in the case of what some regard as the most radical biomedical enhancement of all, the genetic engineering of human embryos. Nor do they amount to a cogent case against pursuing the enhancement enterprise.

In this chapter, we argue that MOOCs and flipped courses are educationally deficient in a number of ways. We also describe how we use technology when we think it will help our students and with an understanding of how to best educate our students. San José State students are smart and tech-­savvy, however, many of them are also working, not just to pay for their own education, but to help their families. We argue that our students do better with engaged interaction with faculty who understand the issues they face, and we are committed to giving them the education they deserve.

This chapter focuses on commitment, defined as an enduring normative determination made in the past to govern the future. More specifically, it examines why one adheres to past normative determinations when present preferences have changed or when present all-things-considered judgment is now to the contrary. It explains the reason-giving and obligation-creating force of commitments and considers one strand of contemporary moral philosophy that credits commitments with a decisive normative force different from that of will-based obligations. It looks at democratic self-government and written constitutionalism in the context of commitment and discusses distinct “modes of deliberative agency.” In addition, the chapter illustrates the importance of self-givenness in commitmentarian freedom by analyzing the work of Michael Sandel, whose views about unwilled commitments are part of his critique of liberalism.

This chapter returns to an older tradition of aesthetics, one inextricably linked to ideas about beauty. It focuses on an aesthetic category—such as beauty—as the ground of relation, as the source of sociality. Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story, “The Birthmark,” is emblematic of the killing effects of the quest for perfection, which is then traced through twentieth-century texts, such as Christopher Bram's Father of Frankenstein, the writings of Harvard ethicist Michael J. Sandel, and ending with the film musical Hairspray. To think of “beauty as an interaction” is to understand that interaction as ethical or unethical.“The Birthmark” represents the latter, Hairspray the former inasmuch as it makes the case not for gender unmoored from the constraints of convention but rather for a democratizing ethics of imperfection.

This chapter details Michael Sandel's philosophical work, most notably his critique of Rawlsian liberalism. In studying ethics and politics, Sandel talks of the relationship between the right and the good, between principles of justice and perceptions of the good life, and claims that it is impossible to separate the two. He criticizes John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas for assuming that the way to universal norms is through separating justice from the good. In addition, Sandel argues for a more serious consideration of religion as a participant in public political dialogues, on account of changing fundamentalist religious views, providing an occasion for learning, and sustaining larger moral meanings. Finally, Sandel turns to the role of the “encumbered” self within the ethics of economic activity, particularly the moral limits of markets, and how his critique of economic liberalism is related to the Marxian tradition.

This chapter examines Michael Sandel's arguments against certain types of human enhancement in order to determine what is and is not morally wrong with the pursuit of enhancement of the human species. The chapter is organized as follows. Part I briefly describes some of his arguments. Part II considers whether, as Sandel claims, the desire for mastery motivates enhancement and whether such a desire could be grounds for its impermissibility. Part III looks at how Sandel distinguishes between treatment and enhancement, and the relation to nature that he thinks each expresses. Part IV examines Sandel's views about parent/child relations and how enhancement would affect distributive justice and the duty to aid. The chapter concludes by offering an alternative suggestion as to why enhancement may be troubling and considers what we could safely enhance.